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Chicago Department of Health (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was in my car yesterday listening to C-SPAN (yes, I do that sometimes), when to my stunned surprise I heard Congressman Dan Burton launch into a diatribe on how mercury in vaccines causes autism. No, this was not a replay of a recording from a decade ago. The hearing was held just a few days ago by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Congressman Burton used this hearing to rehash a series of some of the most thoroughly discredited anti-vaccine positions of the past decade. Burton is a firm believer in the myth that vaccines cause autism, and he arrogantly holds the position that he knows the truth better than the thousands of scientists who have spent much of the past decade doing real science that proves him wrong.

In a classic political move, the committee called on scientists Alan Guttmacher from the NIH and Colleen Boyle from the CDC to testify, but in fact the committee just wanted to bully the scientists. Committee members lectured the scientists, throwing out bad science claims, often disguised as questions, thick and fast. Alas, Guttmacher and Boyle weren't prepared for this kind of rapid-fire assault by pseudoscience.

Burton himself was the worst offender, offering anecdotes and bad science with an air of authority. He stated bluntly:

“I’m convinced that the mercury in vaccinations is a contributing factor to neurological diseases such as autism."

No, it isn't. Dozens of studies, involving hundreds of thousands of children, have found the same thing: there is no link whatsoever between thimerosal and autism, or between vaccines and autism. And Burton went off the deep end with this:

"It wasn’t so bad when a child gets one or two or three vaccines… Mercury accumulates in the brain until it has to be chelated.”

Bang bang, two false claims in 10 seconds. First he claims that mercury from vaccines "accumulates in the brain", a statement with no scientific support at all. Then he claims that chelation therapy is the solution - a radical, potentially very harmful treatment that no sensible parent would ever force on their child. Unfortunately, some quack doctors have experimented with chelation therapy on autistic children, despite that fact that it can cause deadly liver and kidney damage, and one of them caused the death of a 5-year-old boy in 2005.

Burton also claimed that single-shot vials would "eliminate the possibilty of neurological damage from vaccines" - a claim that was invented out of thin air by the discredited anti-vax doctor Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent 1998 study was the spark that started the current wave of anti-vax hysteria.

Congressman Bill Posey from Florida was just as bad as Burton, demanding a study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, a standard talking point of the anti-vax movement. (Congressman Posey: do you even realize that your question is almost identical to what Jenny McCarthy asked five years ago, on the Larry King Live show?) Here's his question to the CDC's Boyle:

"I wonder if the CDC has conducted or facilitated a study comparing vaccinated children with unvaccinated children yet - have you done that?"

Dr. Boyle wasn't prepared for this. She tried to point out that many studies have been done looking at the relation between vaccines and autism, but she didn't get very far before interrupted, thus:

Posey: “Never mind. Stop there. That was the meaning of my question. You wasted two minutes of my time."

Dr. Boyle simply wasn't prepared for a Congressman who was parroting anti-vax activists. It's too late now, but her response should have been this:

Congressman Posey, only an extremely unethical scientist would consider conducting such a study. To compare vaccinated versus unvaccinated children in the manner you suggest, one would have to withhold vaccines from young children. We know from decades of evidence, involving tens of millions of children, that vaccines save lives. Few if any medical interventions are more effective than vaccines.

But Congressman, the scientific community has done observational studies of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, comparing autism rates in children whose parents chose not to vaccinate. Those studies show that autism rates were slightly higher in unvaccinated children. That's right, vaccinated children had autism at a lower rate.

So no, Congressman Posey, the CDC hasn't done a study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. Only a corrupt dictatorship could impose a study like that on its people. Is that what you want?

To make matters worse, the House committee invited Mark Blaxill to testify. Blaxill is a well-known anti-vaccine activist whose organization, SafeMinds, seems to revolve around the bogus claim that mercury in vaccines causes autism. His organization urges parents not to vaccinate their children, and giving him such a prominent platform only serves to spread misinformation among parents of young children.

Blaxill's central claim is that that we're in the midst of an autism epidemic:

"For a long time, reported U.S. autism rates were low, estimated at about 1 in 10,000. Then around 1990 something new and terrible happened to a generation of children. Autism rates didn’t just rise, they multiplied," claimed Blaxill in his written testimony.

His entire argument builds on this. Yet multiple studies, looking carefully and objectively at the data, indicate that all or nearly all of the rise in autism cases is due to increasing diagnoses, which in turn is due to multiple factors: a dramatically broading of the definition of autism in the early 1990s, a greater awareness of the condition, and a greater willingness of doctors and parents to accept the diagnosis. For an objective summary of the evidence, see the articles by neurologist Steven Novella here and here, which summarize a dozen epidemiological studies. The weight of the evidence shows that the actual incidence of autism is either stable or possibly rising very slowly. There is no "autism epidemic."

It's also worth pointing out that Blaxill is a conspiracy theorist who claims that the "CDC has actively covered up the evidence surrounding autism’s environmental causes."

Congress has every right to conduct oversight into medical research at the NIH and the CDC. But when Dan Burton, Bob Posey, and others decide in advance what the science says, and abuse their power to demand "answers" that validate their badly mistaken beliefs, people can be harmed. Over the past decade, the anti-vaccine movement has successfully convinced millions of parents to leave their kids unvaccinated, and the result has been serious outbreaks of whooping cough, haemophilus, measles, chicken pox, and mumps around the U.S. and Europe.

Some anti-vax parents claim that these childhood illnesses aren't so bad. I wish they would talk to the parents of young children who have died in recent whooping cough outbreaks. These illnesses can be deadly.

Message to Congress: science isn't easy, and autism is complicated. Don't criticize science when it doesn't give you the answer you thought you knew. That's not how science works. Thousands of scientists are now trying to identify the causes of autism, and they've made progress, especially on the genetic front. The answer might not be simple, but we will find it.